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mrspoonsi sends this news from The Verge:
Elon Musk can no longer say that no one's ever died in a Tesla automobile crash. But few people will be pointing fingers at the electric car maker for this senseless tragedy. Earlier this month, 26-year-old Joshua Slot managed to successfully ride off with a Model S he'd stolen from a Tesla service center in Los Angeles, but police quickly spotted the luxury vehicle and gave chase. According to Park Labrea News, the high-speed pursuit was eventually called off after officers were involved in a fender bender of their own, leaving the police department strained for resources and without any feasible way of catching up to Slot. Reports claim he was traveling at speeds of "nearly 100 mph," but losing the police tail apparently didn't convince Slot to hit the brakes. Instead he sped on, eventually colliding with three other vehicles and a pair of street poles. The final impact was severe enough to "split the Tesla in half" and eject Slot from the car's remains. The Tesla's front section wound up in the middle of the road and caught fire. Its rear portion flew through the air with such force that it slammed into the side of a local Jewish community center and became wedged there.

" Emergency responders suspected that Slot was already dead when they arrived at the debris-littered scene. But he wasn't. Perhaps it's a testament to Tesla's safety measures that Slot remained alive and was briefly resuscitated en route to the hospital"

Yep you could die in an F1 car if you get thrown out (although it would take a very odd impact - if you don't wear your seatbelt in an F1 car, because of the shape of the cockpit and seat, in a frontal impact you'll become a gross puddle in the footwell).

Incorrect, in modern F1, it's virtually unheard of for the monocoque (the footwell, plus the rest of the area the driver sits in) to be compromise in any way. This includes head on into the barriers at 200mph type crashes. At the British grand prix last week, Kimi Raikkonen walked (with a sore ankle) out of a 47g impact. The monocoque was perfectly in tact.

I'm imagining the guy who designed the Ford Pinto reading this and getting very excited. "When I point that out, they're SURE to give me my job back! So long dry cat food for dinner, hellooo purina select!"

I'm pretty sure he meant that Michael Bay's designed car would be on fire before going 100MPH+, crashing, splitting in two, wedged into a Jewish community center...then exploding (with an impractically large explosion) then transforming into a semi and driving into the sunset.

So, in who's interest is it that the police perform these "for show" stunts?

Wouldn't it be much better to deploy a helicopter, drone or other means of tracking the car from a distance, and not risk killing several bystanders in a crash? This time only the bad guy died, but even him did not deserve capital punishment for a car jack...

When the police called off the chase (for other reasons) and he kept going at 100+mph, there's no "punishment" involved, let alone capital punishment. This is a Darwin Award pure and simple, pure suicide-by-stupid.

I do agree that police chases are a spectacle who's time has long-sinced passed, but you mention drones as a means of tracking them, and they're now "teh new evil" no matter what purpose they're put to by authorities, so until the country gets a little less schizophrenic I don't see that changing.

Did you read article? The police had given up on the chase before the guy crashed the Tesla that the final time.

According to the source, "the pursuit was terminated because there wasn’t enough time or police resources in the area to catch up with the vehicle." It didn't help that the pursuing officers were involved with a minor collision of their own.

Minor collision? The BusinessInsider source claims the pursuing officers had to be hospitalized. That doesn't sound "minor" to me.

And they only broke off pursuit when it became impossible for them to continue, not when it became unsafe. Many police departments now have a policy of not performing chases for non-violent crimes because, statistically, you're more likely to kill bystanders by chasing than by letting the criminal drive off.

Police offices can be hospitalized for even minor injuries, largely because of liability concerns. Just because they're in a hospital doesn't mean they had limbs amputated or third degree burns or severe trauma or some such. It could very well have been whiplash or cuts and bruises or smoke inhalation or even concussion-like symptoms.

Are you suggesting the police pursuit DIDN'T cause him to drive over 100 mph? Because I think the police chase still motivated him to drive that fast. Even if they pulled off at the end, that still doesn't explain why they had to do it in the first place. There was no threat of violence here except for the reckless driving that predictably occurs during a high-speed chase.

"Approaching" 100MPH is what many people do on the way to work every day where the speed limits are 75, and Tesla's should easily be able to handle that speed. Definitely operator error all the way in this case.

Having had the experience of having my own performance car stolen temporarily, and damaging it to the extent of needing a new engine and reupholstering, at the time I felt capital punishment is not enough.

You may think this is a little severe, but people who are into cars feel they have had part of their soul ripped out of them if it is stolen and trashed, especially if it is their personal hobby and they are doing it at the limits of their budget.

I understand that many people attach a lot of their self-image to their vehicles, and devote disproportionate time, attention, and money to them. That doesn't mean that their priorities should be encoded into law.

Your hobby is not more important to society in general than human life. Yes, it may be more important to you than some other person's life. Laws exist partly to mediate between people's conflicting self-interest.

So's your house and all your stuff. Doesn't stop people from feeling violated when their home gets robbed. People are not always strictly rational, and any successful society has to recognize that and deal with it.

Unless I'm misreading it badly, he's not trying to justify the death penalty for carjacking; he's explaining why he wouldn't mourn for a carjacker. And I bet the typical just-robbed homeowner would agree.

Since GM runs ads about how they can remotely kill OnStar equipped vehicles, I am sure that if the capability exists in Tesla Cars, they wouldn't need a warrant to do it. They would only need authorization from the owner. Only time Tesla would need a warrant from the police is if the police are chasing the Owner and the Owner won't grant authorization

So at times the Tesla was being driven at speeds up to 100 MPH, collided with three cars and two utility poles along the way, and eventually suffered an impact that split the car in two, immolating the front half and embedding the back half within a nearby building.

Can't people see how dangerous and unsafe these vehicles are?!?

If something as trivial as multiple high-speed impacts can lead to driver fatality, imagine what could happen in a REALLY serious accident!

I get what you're saying, but if the "high speeds" were "nearly" 100MPH it's not unreasonable to wonder just how the car got literally ripped in half. I do wonder about the safety of a car like that. A lot of the US's top Interstate speed limits are between 70-80MPH. You're not talking a huge difference in speed at that point, so it's not unreasonable to at least question the safeness of the car and ask for some additional testing/data.

Actually, since energy goes up at the square of velocity, a jump from 100 to 70 is double the impact energy.

Also, getting your car ripped in half after hitting a pole apparently is "normal", in that it happens to many cars. https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com] It's unfortunate, but physics isn't your friend in situations like this.

My guess is the Tesla hitting one of the "street poles" (telephone pole?) mentioned while sliding sideways at a high rate of speed was the cause of the car being split in two. This differs from Interstates in a very important way, namely, most poles on or near highways are designed either to break away if struck, or have crash barriers around them to absorb the crash energy. Poles on city streets on the other hand are designed for impacts at city street speeds, not highway speeds. At city street speeds c

How much are you betting that in that last article, the driver of the Maxima wasn't driving 100 MPH? Most highway limits are 65 MPH, you're talking 50% faster, which is perhaps not a "huge difference" but it's not negligible. It also doesn't matter if the car splits in half, as long as the driver is protected within the cage (look at how F1 cars crumple when they crash, without a pole, but protect the driver). What matters more is someone probably not wearing a seat belt...

I get what you're saying, but if the "high speeds" were "nearly" 100MPH it's not unreasonable to wonder just how the car got literally ripped in half. I do wonder about the safety of a car like that. A lot of the US's top Interstate speed limits are between 70-80MPH. You're not talking a huge difference in speed at that point, so it's not unreasonable to at least question the safeness of the car and ask for some additional testing/data.>blockquote>

It's actually a rather common, and well studied occurrence. For instance here's a 70 MPH into a tree [wreckedexotics.com] car split in half. Many cars have had extremely weak [autosafetyexpert.com] side impact designs for years. It's also one of the hardest things to protect against since there is no crumple zone on the side to absorb energy, unlike the front and back.

I bet across the country there are multiple cars split in half every single day, many from hitting narrow objects like light poles at relatively modest speeds, like 45MPH.

get what you're saying, but if the "high speeds" were "nearly" 100MPH it's not unreasonable to wonder just how the car got literally ripped in half.

Last year in a town in California, someone who was not being chased, managed to split a compact car completely in half by hitting a tree. The two parts of the car ended up quite a distance from each other. He wasn't driving on a freeway, or a sidestreet, but was on a street with a 35 or 40mph speed limit. Reports said the speed was "up to 100mph"

Is a win for the Tesla, but it sounds likes it pretty spectacularly failed when he hit something.
Was he not wearing a seatbelt? Since the car was split into pieces that then caught fire, would he of died either way?

Is a win for the Tesla, but it sounds likes it pretty spectacularly failed when he hit something.

...while it was going 100 mph. I'm all for safety but I don't expect ANY car company to design a car that will keep occupants safe in a crash with enough kinetic energy to embed half the car in a fucking building...

Is a win for the Tesla, but it sounds likes it pretty spectacularly failed when he hit something.

...while it was going 100 mph. I'm all for safety but I don't expect ANY car company to design a car that will keep occupants safe in a crash with enough kinetic energy to embed half the car in a fucking building...

Exactly. And with the amount of deaths recorded every year, only the truly ignorant would assume that driving anywhere is a safe activity.

Oh wait a second, I forgot...we already have the truly ignorant behind the wheel who thinks they can text, surf, and drive all at the same time.

From the pictures I saw it looked like it was survivable so long as you weren't in the rear seats. The front of the passenger compartment was intact and whatever fire there was doesn't look like it was very extensive. There might be some melting of the upholstery.

or tries to blame this on the Tesla car killing someone in a 100MPH accident and not the car thief's actions, is a straight up retard

I have no illusions about Musk doing this to get richer but so far his shown that being a psychopath is not a requirement to being a CEO who might actually like to see the world change for better and move humanity forward.

I'm willing to bet the guy wasn't buckled up. Even when cars are tore in half in crashes if the person is buckled in they are usually still attached to the seat (even though they are sometimes dead from the car being sheared in half).

There is like a 95% chance that if he was ejected that he wasn't buckled up (the seat itself would've had to been sheared to cut the lap belt). I bet the final investigation notes that he wasn't buckled in (there is no guarantee of survival if the passenger compartment is compr

"Sgt. Chris Tatar, with the West Hollywood Sheriff’s Station, said five people in the three vehicles that were struck by the Tesla sustained “varying degrees of injury.” They were hospitalized, and had been released as of Monday, he added."

Cyclists ARE a menace, to themselves. I nearly killed one two years ago because he blew a stop sign coming down a hill, swerved in front of me, hooked his tires into a trolley track and fell over about 20' in front of my car. If I hadn't been driving below the speed limit he would have been street pizza.

Biking in hilly, high density areas (like downtown Seattle) should require a license. One that can be revoked.

I recently saw a cyclist come from the sidewalk on my right, cross an intersection diagonally across me (between two left-turning lanes of north/south traffic), get back up onto the sidewalk, and then later get into the bike lane going the wrong way, at an alarming speed.

As a motorist and a cyclist, I was completely stunned. It's cyclists like that why motorists hate cyclists.

Nobody can avoid killing you if you don't even pretend to follow the rules of traffic. But many many drivers forget that they are required by law to not run over cyclists, even if they are inconvenient.

I have seen more cyclists do ridiculous things than I could count. I give them a wide berth, but, I have to admit, some of them seem like they're trying to get killed.

Likewise, a lot of drivers more or less don't give a damn and will practically run them over, or off the road, or door them. Sometimes buses don't even obey bike lanes.

Even better is the reason why cyclists have to use the street, vs the sidewalk - Cyclists are expected to be predictable, and follow a set pattern (i.e. the rules of the road), whereas pedestrians are presumed to be completely unpredictable.

Do the crazy cyclists just not grasp the physics of getting hit by a car?

Nobody can avoid killing you if you don't even pretend to follow the rules of traffic.

I'm a cyclist, and I follow the rules of traffic to the extent that I can. But the metal rims of my bicycle don't have enough surface area to consistently trigger the vehicle-sensing induction loops at intersections. At some intersections in my home town, I've seen even a bicycle and a motorcycle put together fail to trip it. So in the 35 states that haven't passed dead red laws [pineight.com], I don't understand how to follow the law against crossing the street at a red light, other than by not traveling at all.

I step off my bike, hit the walk button, and wait for the walk signal. Then I walk the bike across the crosswalk and get back on. It's really easy to become a pedestrian with a bike, and therefore be subject to the laws governing pedestrians. Just get off the bike!

Likewise, a lot of drivers more or less don't give a damn and will practically run them over, or off the road, or door them.

Or do give a damn and do those things on purpose. Or will throw things at them [latimes.com]. I've only had one or two cases in several years of daily commute cycling where I suspect a driver was maliciously trying to edge me off a road, but in some regions its apparently a frequent hazard, and if anyone brings it up, a lot of victim-blaming happens (e.g. cites story of a time they saw a crazy cyclist similar to yours, then claims the person being harassed by a motorist was probably doing something similarly bad, or attempts to charge the guy for inciting the incident in some fashion (see previous link)).

I try to call out cyclists behaving badly, but I find it isn't all that common. When I'm out and about I notice a lot of cyclists behaving perfectly well -- it's just that the odd one or two that don't are the ones that stick out and you notice. The same is true of any vehicle operator -- it's just that people have gotten so used to seeing several dozen traffic violations every day (e.g. failing to signal, running red lights or stop signs, improper turns, failing to leave appropriate space, various parking offenses) without even touching speeding (which would bring it up to likely some 95% of the traffic on the road -- people failing to exceed the speed limit are more likely to be noticed and considered out of place than people speeding). That one cyclist being crazy (and I agree they exist -- I've seen some pretty egregious cycling behavior before) sticks out more since cyclists in general are more rare, but I suspect fewer cyclists in total behave badly with regard to traffic safety (probably because of the inherent additional danger to cycling).

(in other words, all bad news about Teslas are exaggerated beyond belief, kind of how like cyclists are a menace on city streets due to all of the traffic laws they break, even though cars kill tens of thousands of people a year).

Wait... What 'cars kill tens of thousands of people' has to do with 'cyclist are menace on city'? They are 2 completely different stories. In other words, even though the statement about cars kill a lot of people is true, the statement does NOT make the cyclist are menace to be false.